My
final project is called “BREAK” and I consider it to be the best
piece that I have crafted in this class. The initial prompt we were
given was “play”, which came to just mean do anything. What I
wanted to do was find a way to show people what it is like to be
inside my brain, what it means to fight to depression and deal with
putting an insane amount of pressure on yourself constantly. After
the Ferguson and Garner cases, however, my thinking became much less
introspective. I no longer desired to make something for myself, I
wanted to share a more universal message because that is the effect
I want my art to have on people. So I came up with a master and a
puppet concept (almost directly inspired by master hand from the
Super Smash Bros series) and got to work. I played around with the
idea of fate and how we as humans are affected by it. Your view on
fate will undoubtedly differ from mine but in my eyes we are all
subject to a kind of fate. We are fated to either be a person who is
controlled or not, and it goes deeper than that but that is the core
concept. As a creator my biggest fear is that one day I will be in a
position where I am not in charge of my own life. This could be
because of a job I have, a place I live, or just a change in
personality. So to fight this I created a piece where a character
literally breaks from the hold of his oppressor...or did he? I left
things open ended, not spelling out the whereabouts of the two
characters because that is not the point. Freedom and choice are
always going to be in a state of shifting intensity, and your
relationships to these concepts will change over time. For me now my
definition of freedom is having the power to create as much as I got
just for the sake of creating. Whether we are on a pre-determined
track or not doesn't really matter honestly because we will always be
the biggest catalyst in our own lives. This project reminded my how
much I champion the idea of self-control. Everything starts with you.
Watching my own film made me emotional because it reminded me of how
many people are in chains and feel too helpless to try and break
free. These chains could be: depression, a job, a bad relationships,
etc. yet they are not seen because it is so easy to just accept
negative factors that keep you down. Sometimes all you need to do to
achieve freedom is be who you want to be, regardless of negative
energy that might try and stop you.
This
project is my love letter to any artist that has inspired me and
pushed me to develop my own idea of what it means to break the cycle
of control. In this class I have heard stories of students dealing
with so much adversity, yet the videos they make are amazing. We are
not all born equal or viewed as equal in this world and that is just
a sad fact. However we can make ourselves equal, by standing up for
what we believe in and not letting the world control how we see
ourselves. That is what this class had reaffirmed in my mind, that my
vision to create and inspire will never be squashed by any outside
force that would rather see me silent.
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